Candidate Information
Dr. Mark A. Stalzer
Dr. Mark A. Stalzer is the executive director of the Center for Advanced Computing Research and a member of the Computing & Mathematical Sciences faculty at the California Institute of Technology. At CACR he leads a group of computational scientists that work in aeronautics, applied mathematics, astronomy, biology, engineering, geophysics, materials science, and physics. He also serves as the co-director of both Caltech’s NNSA-funded Predictive Science Center and the Center for the Integrative Study of Cell Regulation. CACR’s efforts often share a strategic theme of using computation to more quickly couple theory and experimental results. Mark is a lecturer and organizer for Caltech’s survey course Methods of Computational Science and he helped form a PhD minor in CSE. Previously Dr. Stalzer was the director of the Information Sciences Lab at the Hughes Research Laboratories where he managed 70 Ph.D. level scientists working on over 50 programs for three Fortune 100 companies. As a senior scientist at Hughes, he was the principal investigator of a DARPA program that developed novel methods for computing radar cross sections with applications to stealth technology. Mark also helped initiate activities in quantum computing and communications at HRL that remain a mainstay of the lab to this day. Dr. Stalzer has a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Southern California, and a B.S. in mathematical physics and computer science from the California State University, Northridge. He also completed the executive program at UCLA’s Anderson Graduate School of Management. Mark is the author of over 50 reports and publications in places such as the Journal of Computational Physics, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids, Parallel Processing Letters, and Scientific Programming. He holds three US patents. Dr. Stalzer is an ACM Distinguished Scientist, a senior member of the IEEE, and a member of AAAS and Sigma Xi.
Dr. Tom Murray
Dr. Murray was trained as a molecular pharmacologist at the University of Washington. He spent two years at the National Institute of Mental Health in Washington, D.C., as a Pharmacology Research Associate Training Program (PRAT) fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Erminio Costa. His current position is professor and chair of the Department of Pharmacology at Creighton University School of Medicine. Murray came to Creighton in 2006 from the University of Georgia, where he was a Distinguished Research Professor and head of the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology of the College of Veterinary Medicine for nine years. Prior to assuming leadership of the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology at the University of Georgia, Dr. Murray served on the faculty of Colleges of Pharmacy at Oregon State University and Washington State University, respectively, for 14 and 2 years.
His laboratory has an active research program in the areas of opioid peptide and glutamate receptor pharmacology and has published more than 160 peer-reviewed articles. His laboratory also uses primary neuronal cultures for high throughput screening and discovery of novel neuroactive natural products. He has served as an editorial board member for Neuropharmacology (1986-1992); the editor of Critical Reviews in Neurobiology (2003-2007); a member of the NIDA Biomedical Research Review Committee (Pharmacology II) (1990-1994); an ad hoc member of the NIH IFCN Review Committee (2000-2002); and the NIDA-K Training and Career Development Committee (2007-2011).
In addition to chairing the Department of Pharmacology in the School of Medicine at Creighton, Murray has served as the Associate Dean for Research in the school since 2008. His current administrative roles also include appointment as the Associate Vice President for Health Sciences Research in 2010.
Dr. Ian R. Davison
Dr. Ian R. Davison is a native of Burton-upon-Trent in the Midlands of England. He received a First Class Honors Degree in Biology from the University of London and a Ph.D. from the University of Dundee in Scotland. He spent two years as a postdoctoral scientist on the Island of Helgoland in Germany supported by fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Royal Society (UK), before joining the faculty of the University of Maine. Over the next 16 years, Dr. Davison established a successful funded program of research, focused on the physiology of algae and aquatic plants, including the response of photosynthetic metabolism to natural and anthropogenic environmental stress. Dr. Davison has fifteen years of administrative experience, almost all directly related to research, including service as the Director of the Maine Sea Grant Program, Director of the Academy of Natural Sciences’ Estuarine Research Center (a soft-money laboratory on the Chesapeake Bay) and, most recently, as the Dean of the College of Science and Technology at Central Michigan University (CMU).
Davison served as interim Vice Provost for Research at CMU for two years (2009- 2011), and his accomplishments in this role include: overseeing a 100% increase in external funding; reorganizing the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs to provide faculty with increased support in technology transfer, compliance, proposals writing and post-award management; providing increased internal funding and mentoring for junior faculty and creating programs to support faculty in the humanities and creative arts. He was instrumental in the formation of the multidisciplinary Institute for Great Lakes Research and for hiring cohorts of research-active faculty in targeted areas ranging from health systems research to atomic physics. Davison is an enthusiastic and expert fly fisherman who spends his spare time in pursuit of trout, salmon and steelhead in Michigan and across the US.